_Diner_ at the Schoolmaster's.
When an author is left so many weeks behind his story as I am, he says
to himself, the deuce may take and carry off to-day's Post-Trinitatis
if he will. I will therefore speak of nothing in this section but of
to-day's Post-Trinitatis, of my sister, my keeping-room and myself. Few
storytellers will have had to-day behind their ink-stands so good a day
as their colleague.
I sit here in Schoolmaster Wutz's upper chamber and have for the last
quarter of a year been holding my arm out of the window as a branch
candlestick with a long light, to shine into the ten German circles. I
shall, every fall and winter, begin to make all my sections as I do
to-day's by candle-light at 41/2 o'clock in the morning; for as the
sublime darkness before midnight lifts man away above the earth and its
clouds, so does that which follows midnight lay us back again in our
earthly nest--after 12 o'clock at night I begin already to feel a new
joy of life, which increases just in proportion as the morning light
streaming down thins the darkness and makes its transparent. Precisely
the finest and most invisible feelers of our soul run on like roots
under the coarse world of sense and are repelled by the most distant
agitation. _E. g_. if the sky is rayless and cloudless toward the east,
and toward the west darkened with heavy clouds, I then just in joke
turn round and round more than ten times--when I stand facing the east
all inner clouds flee away out of my spirit--if I turn toward the west,
they hang down again round about it--and in this way by rapid
revolutions I compel the most opposite sensations to approach and
recede before me.
In this pleasure-section logical order is not even to be thought of;
historical order is alone to be found; only there is many a thought
with a thousand brilliant angles that will be suppressed by my snuffers
when I trim the candle, or drowned in my cup, when I drink out of it
yesterday's coffee. This latter is rather to be recommended to the
public; among all warm drinks cold coffee is, indeed, of the most
detestable flavor, but at the same time of the least potency. The
sleeping day like a sleeping beauty, aglow with her morning dreams,
is already red, and must soon open its eye. Its first business will
be--poetically speaking--to wake up my sister and come with her as a
bedfellow into my chamber. I ought like a Moravian Brother to have two
or three thousand sisters, I so love them all. Verily, many a time, I
feel like striking out with a Satyr's rude goat-feet against the good
female sex, and then let it be, because I see beside me the little
Sunday shoes of my Philippina and my fancy shoves into them the small,
womanly feet, that will have to step into so many a thorn-tangle and
rain-puddle, both of which easily penetrate the thin tapestry of the
female foot. The _empty_ clothes of a person, particularly of
children, inspire me with kindliness and pity, because they remind
me of the suffering which the poor occupant must already have
undergone in them; and once in Carlsbad I could easily have reconciled
myself to a Bohemian damsel, if she would have allowed me to behold her
house-dress, when she was not in it herself....
These _periods_ represent periods of time that have rolled away. Now
the blind are healed, the lame walk, the deaf hear--that is to say, all
are awake; under my feet the schoolmaster is already cracking up the
Sunday sugar; my sister has already laughed at me four times in
succession; the senior parson, Setzmann, has already from his window
whistled to my landlord the most necessary religious edicts for the
day; the clock, like Hezekiah's sun-dial, has, by the miraculous power
of the decreeing whistle, gone back an hour, and I can write so much
longer; but have thereby withdrawn my pencil from my morning sketch.
The sun shines over against my face, and makes my biographical paper a
blank Moses'-visage; it is therefore my good fortune that I can take a
penknife and Austria and Bohemia or the Germany of the Jesuits, namely,
Hamann's maps of the same, and with the knife nail and impale these
countries over my window; such a country always keeps off the
_morning-sun_ as well and throws as much _shadow_ over it, as if I had
the shame-apron or _pallium_ of a window curtain hanging there.
My pen now runs on, in the _earth-shadow_ of the orb, thus: Wutz keeps
not in his house three respectable chairs, no window curtains or
tapestry-hangings. Meanwhile very much too showy furniture lies in
Scheerau; I enjoy here the most miserable, and say to myself, a Prince
can hardly show a worse in an artificial hermitage. Even our almanac
we, I and my landlord, write out for ourselves with our own hands, like
fellows of the Berlin Academy--only with chalk on the keeping room
door; every week we publish a _Heft_ or weekly part of our almanac and
wipe out the past. On the four-square stove three couples might dance,
whom, like the modern tragedies, notwithstanding all deformity of
arrangement and breadth, it would poorly warm through. It must, by the
way, come at last to hand and pocket stoves when the times arrive that
we shall have to fetch out of the mines instead of the metals the wood
wherewith we now feed them....
A ram was terribly pounded, that is, his red shank--the tin platters,
the baptismal presents of the little Wutzes, are dusted out--my silver
knife and fork are borrowed for the occasion--the fire crackles--the
Frau Wutz runs--her children and birds scream.--All these preparations
for a far too great _diner_, which is to-day to be given down below, I
hear up in my study-chamber. Such preparations are perhaps more
suitable to the rank of the two guests who are to receive the
entertainment, than to the station of the two school-men who give it.
To the present historian and his sister, namely, they are permitted to
give a dinner and to sit themselves with the company at the table. The
schoolmaster had been allowed to install much of his cleaned-out
furniture for the space of a week in my sitting-room, because his
own was at last, after long petitioning--for the consistory does not
look with favor on repairs in the visible any more than in the
invisible church--being reformed, _i. e_., repaired, namely
whitewashed.--Therefore he invited me (in court style) to dine, and I
(in similar court style) accepted the invitation.
I shall not write out the rest of the section till evening, partly in
order not to _think away_ my appetite for dinner, partly by way of
hobbling after a little addition to it in the open air, where, besides,
I can hear two or three yellow-hammers and the church-people sing. On
the whole the after-summer, which, to-day, with its finest sky-blue
dress and the sun upon it as order-badge, stands out there upon the
fields, is a still Good Friday of Nature; and if we human beings were
polite people, we should go out oftener into the open air and politely
escort the departing summer to the very door. I foresee I should never
be able to look my fill at the mild sun, which has become a moon
stealing softly around us, and which in the after-summer deserves the
feminine article [_die Sonne_], if I were not obliged to fix my eye
upon the heights of Scheerau, where my good souls live and whence my
Doctor is coming to-day to visit me....
Gone down below the earth is now the day and its sun. A happy journey
home, beloved friend! On the silver-ground with which the moon overlays
thy way, may thy soul paint the lost Eden of youth, and the black
shadow which thou and thy shy steed cast upon the radiant floor must
glide behind you, not before!
Why are most of the population of this book precisely Fenk's friends?
For two substantial reasons. In the first place the quicksilver of
humor which shines out from him side by side with the warmth of his
heart, amalgamates the most easily with all characters. Secondly, he is
a _moral optimist_. I would give ten metaphysical optimists for one
moral one, who knows how to enjoy, not a single plant as the
caterpillar does, but like man, a whole flora of pleasures--who has not
five senses only, but a thousand for everything, for women and heroes,
for fields of knowledge and pleasure parties, for tragedies and
comedies, for Nature and for courts.--There is a certain higher
tolerance, which is not the fruit of the Peace of Westphalia, nor of
the Concord of 1705, but of a life filtered through many years and
improvements--this tolerance finds in every opinion the element of the
True, in every species of beauty the Beautiful, in every humor the
Comic, and does not regard, in men, nations and books, difference and
peculiarity of merit as the absence of it. Not merely with the best
must we be pleased, but with the good and everything.
When the people had come back from the little church and I from
the great one, the dining in the Wutz house began. Our landlord
received the pair of guests with his usual, and with an unusual
friendliness beside; for he had brought home with him to-day from his
church-collection--by creeping into all the pews after divine service
and attracting to himself magnetically all the pennies which had fallen
during the collecting--a considerable silver fleet of 18 pence. The
splendor of the banquet did not in this room crush out the enjoyment.
Knives and forks, as already mentioned, were of silver and from me; but
who could help taking pleasure in performing therewith at a table where
the meats and sauce are dished out of one--pan?--our show-dishes were
perhaps too sumptuous for an elector; for they consisted not of
porcelain, wax or alabaster seeds on plate-glass dishes, nor did they
weigh a few pounds merely: but the two show-dishes weighed sixty, and
were from the same master and of the same material as the electoral
bench, of flesh and blood, namely, Wutz's children. An ecclesiastical
elector would not have been able for pleasure to eat a morsel, if like
us, he had had standing beside his giant-table a dwarf-table with
its little ones around it. Their table was not much larger than a
herring-dish; but they had an eye to proportion and feasted from the
Lilliputian table-service of which since Christmas they had made more
of a sportive than serious use. The little ones were beside themselves,
at cutting up their meat on wafers of plates and with hair-saws of
knives; play and earnest, here as with feasting actors, melted into
each other; and I saw in the end that it was so with me too, and that
my enjoyment arose from artificial littleness and poverty.
At the great table--with other tables the reverse holds--the individual
conversation soon passed over into general; I and the Cantor said every
moment "the Prussian," "the Russian," "the Turk," meaning (like the
Prime Minister) by the nation in each case its Regent. I took to-day
such a peculiar pleasure in miserable customs, that I let every morsel
be _preached into_ me and drank over twenty healths. Ladies of rank
cannot let themselves down to unfrizzled people so easily as men can,
at least to those of the female sex; but my sister deserves that her
brother should bestow upon her in his book the praise of the handsomest
and most amiable condescension. The more womanly a lady is, so much the
more disinterested and good-natured is she; and those maidens,
especially, who love _half_ the human race, love the _whole_ heartily,
_e. g_., in regard to the Resident Lady von Bouse, one knows not
whether she bestows more on the poor or on the men. Old maids are
stingy and hard. My doctor and a bottle of wine came in as dessert. As
he reads in the present book every week, I prefer to scold rather than
praise him in it. The best I can do is to weave in here an ambiguous
thing, which with many will amount neither to praising nor blaming
him--his hearty inclination toward the female sex, which stands midway
between indifferent gallantry and ardent love. This same inclination
suits our sex very well, but not the female, to which, however, my
sister belongs. The affair grew simply out of her left ear. The
ear-ring had torn its way through the ear-flap; she ought, however,
properly to have waited till Monday, when her brother would have bored
her ear for her, like that of a Jewish slave, in the most skillful
manner. But it must be done to-day and his doctor's hat was the cover
of her design. It should have made the subject of a picture, how the
poor Pestilentiary rubbed and polished the ear-flap between his three
front fingers--like a medical leaf which one is to smell of--in order
to make it swollen and insensible.
Nothing is more perilous to me and the medical counsellor, than to pick
and stroke at a lady with two or three fingers--to stretch the whole
arm around her is, for us, attended with no danger whatever; just as
nettles burn far more when lightly touched than when grasped
vigorously. Perhaps it is with this fire as with the electric fluid,
which passes into man in a larger stream through the tips of the
fingers than through a broad surface. My sister went further and
brought an apple; the Doctor had to press with his pulse-fingers the
red ear-tip against the apple, and then force an egrette, or whatever
it was, through this organ of sense, which maidens prick up much
seldomer than they pucker-up the one nearest to it--and now could be
buckled or buttoned in what belonged there. The steel almost chained
the operator himself to her ear. "There is nothing with which a beauty
attaches one to her more effectually, than by giving one occasion to do
her a favor," the Doctor himself said and learned it by his own
experience. Hence the operator and ear-magnetizer complained it was
hard to cure a beauty without loving her, and that his first fair
patient had almost made a patient of him. I have nothing against the
Doctor; let him be a cosmopolite in love if he will--but, Sister, I
would thou wert already in bed, because any minute in which I merely
take two or three steps up and down, I am not sure that thou wilt not
be squinting into my chapters and reading what I blame in thee. Ah, I
blame less than I pity thy fancy, that plays so airily around thy own
and others' troubles, and thy heart so spun out of the tenderest
fibres, that the white crown of _shy womanliness_, which alone adorns
and exalts all these traits, has, in the crowded apartments of the Lady
Resident become slightly tarnished with black, like silver in marshy
Holland, and that thy virtue, which essentially wants nothing, wants
the form of virtue! Ye parents! your young men can hardly make
themselves black in hell; but for your daughters and their _snow-white_
raiment Heaven itself is scarcely clean enough!
They are seldom worse than their company, but also seldom better. This
spiritual wine absorbs the flavor of the Apples-of-Eve and of-Paris
which lie about it; after that it still tastes good, only not like
wine.
The Doctor gave me much light on Gustavus's condition, which at a
proper time shall in turn be given to the reader.
A certain person, who almost every fortnight reads over what I have
written, is satirical, and asks me whether on page Aaa Zzz the further
courting between Paul and Beata will be worked out--he further asks,
whether it has been already related to the reader, that the coquetting
Paul has since that made verses, profiles, bouquets and adagios, in
order to bring on and present his heart in these dessert dishes, these
pierced fruit-dishes, these confect-baskets--this _enfant terrible_ of
a mocking personage asks finally whether it has been already reported
to the world that Beata, however, cared for nothing of it all but the
empty basket[67] and the empty dessert dish.... At bottom this malice
never offends me; but Doctor Fenk and the reader have manifestly the
wickedest ingenuity in placing and seeing heart-matters in a false
light. Verily, it has heretofore been mere joke, my alleged love; and
if it were not, it must needs become such, because such a handsome and
meritorious rival as I, it seems, am to meet in Gustavus, I could not
find it in my heart to outstrip and overshadow, even if I had the power
or the liberty, which to be sure is not the case.